A number of activities are required in development projects, in order to ensure appropriate consideration of RAMS  in development processes. The following aspects are relevant in this respect (based on requirements from IEC 60300/ISO 9000-4):

• Implementation, use and maintenance of quality assurance system according to ISO 9001/2/3.
• Establishment and maintenance of an organization with relevant competence in safety and reliability.
• Accessibility to relevant quantitative and qualitative analysis techniques.
• Establishment and maintenance of databases for experience feedback.

The development of a plan for the reliability and safety activities to be conducted in a development project, which will govern e.g. the resource use, type of analyses to be conducted, and depth of analysis in different phases of the development are most important.

SINTEF assists organizations in development and adjustment of methods and tools for planning, managing and conducting the reliability, safety and maintainability activities required by IEC 61508 and IEC 60300/ISO 9000-4 (and other standards and directives) in a development process. In the planning aspect, challenges are related to establishing routines and tools for activity planning. This encompasses, e.g., guidelines for establishment of optimal activity sequences, which analyses to be conducted at which point in the development process, responsibilities, resource allocation and establishing routines for information flow between different activities related to reliability and safety.

SINTEF has expertise in using well know techniques (FMECA, fault tree analyses, Event trees, etc) In addition the department have developed new methods for quantitative and qualitative analysis techniques, e.g. the PDS-method. We also co-operate closely with other departments within SINTEF and also with the industry.

Contact: